Two general approaches can be used to combine digital services into a multiplex. In one case, services are encoded at a constant bit rate, such that each of the services uses a fixed amount of the capacity of the broadcast multiplex. Another approach is to encode the service using a variable bit rate to take advantage of the time varying statistics of the service, and dynamically share the aggregate capacity among the different services. This method, known as statistical multiplexing, can allocate increased bitrate to services when there is a need and decrease the bitrate on others to provide better quality of service across all services. As a result statistical multiplexing can provide a link utilization improvement sometimes referred to as the statistical multiplexing gain.